How do students complain? Researchers found some surprising results. Photograph: David Levene

There may be no truly satisfactory way to measure how much or how well students complain. But several teams of researchers have tried. One attempted to measure how students complain; another, how they intend to complain. A third team tried to gauge students' attitudes to complaining. These are not easy to measure well, or consistently.

In 2010, David Hart and Nigel Coates, at Northumbria University's Newcastle business school, published a study called International Student Complaint Behaviour: How Do East Asian Students Complain To Their University? in the Journal of Further and Higher Education. They interviewed students at a UK higher education institution, but they masked its identity, revealing only that it was "a large UK university" with a total of 31,000 registered students, a staff-to-student ratio of 22:1, and that it "has been ranked 73rd in the 2009 Good University Guide".

The researchers talked with many (specifically: 10) students, who hailed originally from Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong or Taiwan. The data accumulated from this sampling led Hart and Coates to the finding that "East Asian students are willing to share their dissatisfactory experiences with university staff".

Hart and Coates caution that their investigation came up against some limits. First, "the fact that the interviews were conducted in English may have presented some problems to the respondents being able to accurately convey their opinions". Second, their "apparent willingness to complain is mediated by a common fear amongst respondents that complaining about a lecturer or course may affect the grades they receive from the university".

In 2011, At Pace University in New York City, business school researchers Vishal Lala and Randi Priluck surveyed how each of 288 students might intend to go about complaining. Lala and Priluck published a study in the Journal of Marketing Education, in which they announce their major discovery: that "students complain to the school only if the effort involved is minimal and they believe the school will respond".

That's not the whole story, of course. Lala and Priluck say some students would be inclined to complain not to the school, but to their friends and to "unknown others". Influenced by "personal characteristics", some of those would-be complainers say they would complain in person; others indicate a preference for grousing on the web.